My five Lost In… books have been hugely popular. So popular that they’re now under shopping agreements with production companies!

Lost in London was the first. It’s a great premise: Local girl takes a school trip to London that’s initially a bust. Then she and her new friends get involved in an action-packed adventure, things turn around, and they get wrapped up in a mystery only they have the tools to solve.

What’s the recipe?

  1. Fun/funny characters. The cast in Lost in London is great. I mean, really funny and quirky.
  2. Adventure/hijinks.
  3. Exciting city. London is a colorful backdrop.

Do you know what those three things are at their core? The basic building blocks of writing: Character, Plot, and Setting. When I go to school visits, I discuss my writing process in terms of these three building blocks, and here it is in action.

Funny characters, an action-packed plot, and a colorful setting is soooo much better than those dreaded SRA cards in the back of the classroom. (If you don’t know what SRA is, see episode # 4).

When Lost In London came out, its popularity grew quickly. I’d already begun other books (I tend to work on or think about many books at the same time), but those were not conceived as Lost In books at the time. This is what I was working on:

  1. A book wherein a girl travels around Ireland to get un-cursed. The working title was Lucky Me.
  2. An idea of a book where a girl works in a pizzeria and begins making romantic matches based on people’s pizza preferences entitled #PizzashopMatchmaker.
  3. Another project that only had a title: Pardon My French. As a francophone, I knew I wanted to do something French, possibly Parisian and I thought that was a great title for a book, but that’s all I had.

When Lost in London was deemed a huge success, the works above were re-analyzed.

Lucky Me was already published, and it was decided that we’d re-release it as Lost in Ireland.

The pizza book was originally set in the US but was re-engineered and moved to Rome.

Lastly, Pardon My French was given an awesome cast and plotted into a scavenger hunt around Paris for concert tickets and retitled Lost in Paris.

But, wait there’s more. I had another in me. Another setting I loved: Hollywood! I created zany new characters and plotted a treasure hunt around the city with interesting historical tidbits.

And that’s how what’s now known as the Lost In… series came to be. If you’re wondering if there are any more Lost In books coming out, keep watching because I have something ghostly in the works.

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